I’ve been making, what is, for me, quite a lot of bread in the month since Harry died. Probably, in an ideal world, where both Phil and I weren’t either almost constantly watching our weight, or actively trying to lose it, I would bake something every day, and more often than not, that thing would be bread. There’s just something about making a loaf of bread I find immensely comforting and reassuring.

In this very sad and busy time for us, I’ve been turning to quick breads frequently. I love proper yeasted breads, but quick breads have many obvious virtues, not the least of which is found in the name itself; they’re quick. No rising, no kneading, and in my experience, they’re forgiving little things, which take to freestyle adaptation happily enough. As long as you basically get the ratio of dry ingredients to wet right, and don’t stuff up the leavening, you’re golden. If you’re using self-raising flour, you’re set for the alkaline part of the leavening reaction without needing to find the measuring spoons. Yogurt, buttermilk, sour milk, beer, etc., will all take care of the acid. Then it’s just flavour as desired.

Mostly, I’ve just been making soda bread. I’ve always got yogurt, buttermilk, or, alas, milk that’s gone sour hanging about in the fridge, and if I’m not just going with my handy, ever-present little sack of self-raising flour, there’s always baking soda and/or baking powder in the pantry. Salt and honey in the house are givens. I’m never more than a couple of minutes of gathering the ingredients and mixing up the dough away from having a loaf of soda bread in the oven. I’ve been adding in rolled oats and playing with the flour mix from time to time, because both Phil and I prefer hearty, chewy, wholegrain bread, but you can always sweeten it up by mixing in some dried fruit — currants are particularly nice for this. You get something that tastes a bit like a rather austere scone.

This morning I realised that having a small loaf around for the rest of the weekend,would be useful, which brings me to another of quick bread’s chief virtues: you can make a pretty small loaf. If you’re using little packets of dried yeast, one is usually the right amount for a full-sized loaf, but if you have neither the time, nor the need, for a full-on 2lb sized loaf, this is where a savoury or plain quick bread will serve you well. I didn’t want to make soda bread yet again; I wanted something a bit savoury, and as I happened to have a single, lonely, bottle of Peroni taking up space in the pantry fridge, and most of a small bag of self-raising flour around, it seemed like a good time to make an old favourite: beer bread. I also had a nice-sized wedge of mature Lancashire cheese that wasn’t going to be used if we didn’t actually have bread to use it with, so I grated about a very loosely-packed cup of that into my dry ingredients, ground a bunch of black pepper in after that, then whisked about a teaspoon of honey and a tablespoon of melted butter into the beer, mixed it all together (do not overwork the quick breads, for they are like muffins, and benefit from lumpy batter!) and dumped it into a greased 1lb loaf pan. Pop it into a 180º C oven, and one gorgeously fragrant hour later, there’s my loaf of bread to see out the weekend.

So we ended up having an unexpected guest last night; Phil texted his dad at midnight, to say happy new year, and invited him to drop in when he got back from his evening with Phil’s cousin’s family. He came in and had a drink and a chat with us, ’round the dining room table, then eventually pushed off and I went to bed. Phil obviously stayed up for a couple more hours, so come morning, I was up early, and he still slumbers on.

To keep myself occupied, and because we have his dad coming back tonight for our usual Friday dinner, I started mooching through the leftovers, looking for ways to give them new life. I had a bunch of filo scraps, many lemons, so many eggs, and as it happens, horrifying amounts of caster sugar, and a big pot of Fage Greek yogurt in the fridge, along with a vague memory from my baklava research, of something called patsavoura glyko, a sweet yogurt pie made with jumbled-up filo scraps. No delicate handling needed, just bunch ’em up in the bottom of a lightly greased pan, mix up the yogurt with oil, sugar, eggs, a bit of baking powder, and some vanilla extract (although I added some lemon zest, ‘cuz I think lemon zest improves practically any creamy sweet thing), which you then pour over the filo, and bake at about 200° C for 30-ish minutes or so. Then you let it cool, and pour over a hot lemon syrup, and voilà, you got your patsavoura glyko. Because I cannot leave well enough alone, or, seemingly, follow a recipe precisely, I cut the recipe roughly in half, as I’m only feeding three people, and there was the lemon zest, and there might possibly be some rosewater in the syrup, because I love rosewater.

It’s cooling now, and I am soon to take a break from writing to make the syrup. At the moment, however, I have some oxtails roasting in the oven, as a preliminary to making a good, hearty, beef stock. When I first moved over here, the BSE-era rules about beef on the bone were still strictly enforced, and this made it hard to make a really good stock. Happily, the ban ended some time back, but finding good soup bones can still be a challenge, and I was resigned to commercial beef stock (the liquid Touch of Taste concentrate is actually pretty good) until one day, in Sainsbury’s, I spotted some oxtails. Hello! I thought. Beef bones, and in a nice, compact form. I had absolutely no experience with oxtail, but figured they’d work, and so they did. You want an intensely flavoursome jellied beef stock, which freezes beautifully? Oxtail. Very strong, so it has to be cut with water, but it’s nice to have so much flavour for such a small commitment of freezer space, always at a premium around here.

So, to get rid of my stock of wilting herbs, some sad-looking celery, and a few flabby carrots (all still perfectly fine and safely edible, just nothing you’d want to bite into raw), I grabbed a package of oxtails when I saw them in the shop. I’ll pull them out of the oven, chuck them in one of my slow cookers (I, uh, have three of them, and I’d probably buy a mini if I could find one) with the veg and herbs, cover it all with water, and then ignore it for 12 hours or so, which is when the unpleasant part comes, and I have to strain it. Gack. Worth it, but I do dread that part.

There appears to be some kind of paleo/autoimmune cult around bone stock these days, and, well, I doubt it’s quite the miracle devotées of said cult believe, but it’s good stuff, and if people who invest it with magical properties create enough of a demand for it that I can find oxtails easily, without having to go to the inconveniently-located butcher, great! Unfortunately, this also drives prices up — see what happened to lamb shanks for an example — but every time I see a £3 whole chicken in the shops, I feel kind of sad and horrible, as I wonder what kind of conditions those chickens, and the people who raise and process them, must live and work in. Organic/free-range seem more realistically priced, but harder to find. Still, if your food budget is severely limited, there’s a couple of meals to be got from a chicken…and then I remind myself that I am being one of those middle-class people, the kind who is one patronising step away from telling economically disadvantaged people all of the time-consuming and skill-heavy ways they could be feeding themselves cheaper and more healthily, and I want to smack myself.

Right. So that bit up there was such a downer that I wandered off to make my rosewater/lemon syrup, which I duly soaked my cake with, and the cake tastes great, although it’s far from photogenic. You know what is photogenic? This:

I found Yorkshire pudding more intimidating than baklava. I don’t cook much plain English, and it would be just like me to fall on my ass with something so simple. Fortunately, it was great!

I made toad-in-the-hole for tea, as I think my father-in-law had kind of hit the wall with all the spicy stuff I’ve been cooking of late, and on a wretchedly cold and rainy night, stodge with onion gravy goes down a treat. I used some of my leftover onion confit as a base for the gravy, and got another couple of hundred grams of flour and 4 eggs out of my overstock — I made far too much batter, but it’ll keep well enough, so I’ll make something else of it tomorrow. Possibly some sort of clafoutis, depending on what kind of fruit I can scrounge up. I swear I am totally going off desserts as a regular thing, once Phil goes back to work, because god knows the extra kilo of holiday lard needs to be driven off as soon as possible, but in the meantime, the ugly Greek yogurt and filo cake tasted much better than it looked.

I keep waking up in the night, worrying about how I’m going to get everything done, and what I have to cook or bake or buy today. Then I remind myself it’s OK, I have no more to do for Boxing Day, and now all I have to do is repurpose leftovers. And that’s going pretty well! Plenty went straight into the freezer, and can just be thawed and heated up at a later date, and I’ve made two batches of soup so far, some of which went to feed us, some went to my father-in-law, and the rest will be eaten, or remade into something else, and frozen. It’ll be OK! I’m basically done! But my nervous system hasn’t quite got the message yet.

Back to the food on the day, though. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I had a roomful of people wanting to eat, Phil didn’t get a chance to take photos of the albóndigas or the chorizo a la sidra, but meatballs and sausages aren’t terribly photogenic anyway, and trust me, they were delicious. The sausage I bought from Lunya was perfection, and many thanks to Lunya’s chef, who came out of the kitchen, carrying sausages from his own stock, when the shop assistant kindly went back to find out which of their (many, many) sorts of chorizo I should use, in response to my query, insisting I must use these sausages, these were the sort they used, and unsurprisingly he was right, as they were fantastic. (Basically, you need to go with an uncured sausage, and they had only cured in the deli’s chiller case.) I can’t say enough nice things about Lunya. I’ve been going in there for years, and have never found the staff anything less than helpful and friendly and totally knowledgable about their wares.

And there’s the muhumarra! This turned out to be my favourite thing, and it was totally last minute; I had some uneaten roasted red peppers, a lot of leftover walnuts, and a few bits of stale bread to use up, and thus, gorgeous, lovely, muhumarra.

All as seen previously, but perhaps a little more clearly here. The spanakopita disappeared in the first round of feasting, and the sausage rolls weren’t far behind. I kicked some butt with those, I did. (Plenty stashed in the freezer, but people were losing steam at that point, so I didn’t bake more.)

Muhummara, oh I am so pleased with that stuff. And so pleased I have the leftovers all to myself. Yum!mezze corner! olives, nibbly things, guacamole, hummus, muhammara, Greek salad (that was amazing; I’d been tenderly ripening those tomatoes for days, glimpses of spanakopita and mediterranean herbed steamed potatoes

And there it is, my culinary meisterwerk. No, not, strictly speaking, a purely tapas spread, as Spain was far from the only country represented, but we most definitely did not have the traditional British or American holiday spread. To me, the spirit of tapas and mezze and the groaning board in general is pretty universal; come, eat, be sociable, and happy. Yes, I totally overdid it, but what the hell: it was good.

Well, so much for my plan to write about the experience as it was happening, because as it played out, I had absolutely no time whatsoever that was unaccounted for as I was going along. Holy shit, the last week as been frenzied, and time to even sit down at all, much less write something coherent about the experience, simply didn’t exist.

Spoiler: Nailed it, but it wasn’t easy.

TL;DR: I was overly ambitious, and made way too much food, which doesn’t surprise me, given my tendency to overdo everything, and my irrational, deep-seated fear of under-catering any dining event which I am hosting. So now I have a bunch of happy, well-fed people who have gone home, and a hell of a lot of leftovers, many of which went straight into the deep freeze, and some of which are going to be repurposed over the next couple of days. Most of the soups I plan on making will go into the freezer as well. And I have many, many eggs left, which will keep for a couple of weeks, in my experience, given that they were very fresh when I bought them, and well, all that cheese, so much jamón, endless chorizo…omelettes and fritatta, dead ahead, is basically what I’m saying.

But to the pretty pictures — taken by Phil, who busted his ass helping me get set up on the day, and heroically walked to Sainsbury’s and found leaf coriander and mild chiles on Boxing Day morning, thus saving the guacamole — which, alas, aren’t complete, mostly because there just was no time at all to get everything photographed individually, and on the table in a reasonable facsimile of on time:

First, I spent the evening of the 23rd and the afternoon of the 24th doing my cookies, candied nuts, and baklava. Oh, the baklava. The baklava that was my pride and joy, and to my utter, though modestly restrained glee, deeply impressed the actual Greeks at our party. So I was able to dump most of the leftovers on them, and get that delicious, gooey evil out of my house. But here’s what it looked like in its pristine state:

Maple syrup walnut baklava. Look at that shine!

I came up with the idea to use slightly reduced maple syrup to soak the pastry, and figured if I could come up with the idea, surely somebody else had before me. Google showed this to be true, so after reading through a few recipes, I hacked together something to my satisfaction. I hauled my ass out to the amazing and wonderful Liverpool 8 Superstore, utterly deserving winner, incidentally, of this year’s BBC Radio4 You and Yours Best Food Retailer Award, to get some hardcore awesome Turkish filo dough, and some lovely Lebanese walnuts, and that trip was worth it (mind you, it always is) because it is so, so, much better than frozen or (most; Theos’ is pretty damn good) mainstream chiller case supermarket stuff.

I think I’ve got the touch, when it comes to filo dough, because I had no trouble whatsoever with it, and the Turkish stuff was amazing to handle. It felt a bit sturdier than I was expecting, and I was very prompt in getting the waxed paper and damp tea towel back on it with every sheet, and in all, so surprisingly pleasant to work with that I decided to go ahead and make spanakopita with the remaining sheets. I had plenty of those, because I bought quite a lot of filo under the assumption that it was highly possible I’d make a cack-handed mess out of it. I didn’t, and now I think of it, my previous filo experiences have generally worked out just fine, so I don’t know why I was so worried.

I go for a slightly rustic look to my shortbread; I am all about the texture, and this was perfect. Pro tip: make your flour mixture about 1/3 rice to 2/3 white wheat.

Gingerbread, the baklava again, and a gingerbread crime scene on the baking parchment to the left.

The tower block of cookies! Sugar cut-outs, chocolate chip, shortbread, gingerbread trees and people, snickerdoodles and cashew butter blossoms. (I found some chocolate-covered cashews which I used in lieu of Hershey’s Kisses.)

Anyway, along with the baklava, I baked many batches of cookies. Probably too many, as it turned out, because even though I was handing out huge bags of them, I still have lots stashed in the freezer. We will be having cookies for dessert in March at this rate, when we’re not having cupcakes. The remaining baklava I can slowly take care of myself. Today’s healthy breakfast (and oh god, I need to get back on the clean eating bandwagon like now) consisted of a leftover baklava diamond and a cup of coffee.

Sugar corner. Cupcakes, trifle, cookies, baklava. Off to the right, the two loaves of bread I baked on Boxing Day morning, to go with the cheese. All the fat. All the carbs.

There’s the naughty corner of the spread, displaying the cupcakes (red velvet with cream cheese frosting, double chocolate), the cookie tree, and the enormously popular strawberry/rhubarb trifle. As if the trifle weren’t sinful enough, I beat some marscapone into the custard. Other than a couple of leftover scoops stuffed into the empty double cream pots which left with a happy, trifle-loving cousin, that was mercifully devoured on the day, so I haven’t got that sitting around, because holy cow, it was irresistible, and well worth stashing some good rhubarb and strawberries in the deep freezer while they were still to be found in the shops, in anticipation of making this for Boxing Day.

Also to be seen, the bread, and there will be a better view of that in the next post. I baked that on the day, because nothing goes stale faster than homemade bread (it is fleetingly delicious beyond any shop-bought loaf, and fortunately, toast is a thing) and I didn’t want to go to all that effort, only to serve bread at less than its best. I made one loaf of sourdough (the long, vaguely oval one) and one loaf of maple-pecan wholemeal, which is utterly gorgeous with strong cheese.

…in my freezer. I am so deeply into the weeds with this Boxing Day tapas spread nonsense that I have two unfinished posts sitting in the draft bin, mostly because as I was writing them, I would suddenly think of something that needed doing, and I’d get up and get stuck in, and then three days would pass, my computer would decide to up and shut down and restart (thanks, Apple!), thus automatically shuffling them into the draft tank (thanks, WordPress!) and then I forgot what I had in mind to write about in the first place.

But it was probably a run-on sentence. I’ll check when I get time (ha!) and see if I can finish them. (Done. See below.)

And then I got up to put my tester tortilla patatas together and in the oven, so I nearly abandoned another post. Yes, I always fry my tortillas, as god and the Spanish intended, except when I’m trying to feed something on the order of seventeen people, in which case, I start Googling stuff like “baked spanish tortilla” and “tortilla traybake.” The Beeb’s Good Food site had me covered, and there are other sources who seem to think this is a workable idea, so I’m trying it. It seems likely to be easier and more likely to be successful than my other plan, which was freezing them. Some sources say OK, some say not OK, and my own personal experience has suggested “mostly OK” is the answer, but definitely not ideal, as they come out a little watery. If I’m just feeding it to myself and Phil, that would be fine, but guests? (Some of whom are, to put it mildly, somewhat judgmental.) Nope. We’ll try the traybake tortilla idea first, thanks. I’m also having a go at making it with fancy Spanish potato chips, because if I can spare myself using the mandoline and then frying several pounds of thinly sliced potatoes, I will gladly take that shortcut. My last mandoline adventure ended in blood and tears when I shaved off a thumbprint, and this is something I do not want to repeat. So it will be me, a pile of spuds, a peeler and the Mighty Magimix if this doesn’t work.

Also, because I am insane, and have this deep abiding fear of there not being enough food for everybody to eat a huge portion of every single thing available, and for there to be a wide variety of things of which to eat a huge portion, I have decided we really need to have spanakopita as well. So I’ve got a bunch of steamed and brutally wrung-out spinach and some onions cooling, waiting to be blended with herbs and some godawful expensive barrel-aged feta and a bit of ricotta. I’m trying not to think of the phyllo part. If I had any brains, or more freezer space, I might just try to make it as one big pie, but no, that’s not going to be possible. Hey, at least the triangles freeze well, right? This has become my new standard: does it freeze well? Then we’ll consider it. Except ice cream of course, because I’ve got six enormous batches of cookie dough to bake, a tray of baklava to assemble, cupcakes, and a trifle to make. I think we’ve got sweets covered. (Oh, but I’m making custard anyway, the evil little perfectionist demon whispers in my ear. FUCK OFF, DEMON.)

But I am quite possibly going to make those padrón peppers stuffed with goat’s cheese and drizzled with honey. I impulse bought those peppers in a OMG NOT ENOUGH FOOD panic yesterday afternoon, and I frankly don’t know what else to do with them. Daft, yes, wasteful, no.

…and the spicy tomato jam is done and jarred. And very good, if you like that sort of thing, which I do.

…and the tester tortilla is done as well, and it is MAGNIFICENT. So that’ll work and has the potential to make Boxing Day morning less fraught.

And now I’m going to sit down with a cup of coffee while my phyllo comes up to room temperature, and spend some time fretting over my list.